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Thursday, July 10, 2003The intertwining histories of black and white, of slaves and the free suggested to Mr. Waterstreet correspondences to the intersecting worlds of the deaf and those who can hear. The show has been cast accordingly. Half the roles are played by actors who speak and sing, half by deaf actors whose parts are unobtrusively voiced by others. And simultaneously, all cast members without exception do their own lines in ASL. (For a hearing audience, the talking functions as effectively as supertitles at the opera, in reverse.) ...Dropping in on a rehearsal in the theater district, I think I was expecting quaint Americana, punctuated partly by flying hands and partly by the sort of rudimentary semaphore that pioneering directors like Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars have sometimes felt impelled to invent. Instead, I saw a living language, almost completely unknown to me, yet always beautiful, filled with gestures and images that either as pictures or as spontaneous expressions of ideas instantly made intuitive sense. The stab of emotion when Huck and his friend Jim, the runaway slave, sing of escaping down the Mississippi was sure and sudden, especially when they joined hands for the final sign: second and third fingers of one actor's hand "standing" atop the back of the other's rocking hand in the perfectly clear sign for the verb "to ride." What an eloquent image of freedom! And then there was the chorus, "singing" their last refrain of "Waitin' for the Light to Shine" in silence, their palms spreading from their faces like so many soft sunbursts. American Sign Language is a beautiful thing to behold. I have a patient who uses it. She either brings an interpreter ($60 at my cost, but that's a rant for another day) or her daughter to translate. She's a very talkative woman, and her hands just fly like mad the whole time she's in my office, but in such beautiful, expressive, fluid movements. I've noticed her daughter, who is also my patient, has the habit of using sign language to augment her own conversation, even when she's not with her mother. The daughter says that English is her second language. ASL is her first. posted by Sydney on 7/10/2003 01:37:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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